The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands

FAERY MUSIC
The idea troubled him that I should leave the Isle of
Muck without his confessing to me that he was none other
than the hearer of faery music. Thereafter Colin became
more communicative ; and I left him with the promise that
one day I would return to Muck, in order to reduce to
musical form such faery melodies as he could recollect
having heard.
A Faery Orchestra.
There is a tale told in the Lewis of how two young men
chanced to be passing a faery knoll at the witching hour,
when the knoll suddenly opened and emitted a green light.
For a moment tlie men stood in astonishment, not knowing
what had befallen them, until they realised that they were
listening to a faery orchestra secreted in the very interior of
the knoll. So overcome was one of them by the strains of
faery music—he himself being a fiddler of sorts—that he
straightway forsook his companion, and made for the green
light. No sooner had the passing fiddler been admitted to
the company of the faeries than the knoll closed. And so
enchanted was he by the music of the faery orchestra, and
he himself contributing his part with a fiddle the faeries had
lent him, that he eventually returned to his people in the
belief that he had been absent but a few hours, whereas he
actually had been away a year and a day. So well did he
play his fiddle thereafter that no one dared disbelieve his
story that he had performed with a faery orchestra..
Music equally enthralling was once heard by a Skye-man
in the Braes of Portree, when passing the hillock known to
the Gaelic-speaking natives by a name signifying Faery
Knowe of the Beautiful Mountain.
And, then, delightful pipe-music has been heard issuing
from underneath the Dun of Caolis, at the eastern end of
Tiree; and the old folks of Tiree used to say that to this
music they often heard the marching of many feet underground.
Black MacKenzie of the Pipes.
One, MacKenzie by name, who later became weaver to
the laird of Barcaldine, happened to be homeward bound one
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